According to Business Insider, a single minute of downtime costs a data center over $8,000. Furthermore, based on an average reported incident length of 90 minutes, the average cost of a single downtime event was estimated to be $720,000. Also, consider how much that minute costs your business, including – transactions canceled or locked, a tarnished brand, and eventually the number of customers lost.
IT professionals are overwhelmed by unplanned outages. 84% of data center professionals say they would rather walk barefoot over hot coals than have their data center go down at any time. A Study on Data Center Outages conducted by the Ponemon Institute indicated that unplanned data center outages present a complicated and costly challenge for organizations.
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“The vast majority of companies have an unplanned outage at some point,” says Larry Ponemon, founder and chairman of Ponemon Institute. N average, companies experienced two complete outages and six partial outages, a slight decrease from 2010. The impact of outrage on a business is severe,” Ponemon says. Customers are less patient and forgiving than ever, and the cost can be high. So it’s critical to devote resources to data center availability and extend the thinking to cloud providers.”
Four ways to prevent Data Center downtime are –
Avoid Common Causes – The primary sources of downtime include UPS battery failure, accidental emergency power off or human error, UPS capacity exceeded, IT equipment failure, weather, and water incursion.
Design a Strategy – Utilize best practices in data center design, backup, and geo-redundancy to maximize availability. Focus on equipment, methods, and planning.
Have a Backup Plan – Dedicate ample resources to bringing a data center backup in case of an unforeseen outage or performance degradation. Dual-powered data centers have increased IT reliability by ensuring power distribution and delivery. Improper implementation can negate or diminish the effectiveness of dual power designs.
Test Systems – Regularly test generators and switch gears to ensure emergency power is available during a utility outage.
Proactive Monitoring – IT administrators must implement data center monitoring tools and strategies to improve continued operations. With the introduction of automation and other remote site management tools for the data center, businesses can reduce the amount of hands-on administrator activity, leading to less downtime risk.
Source Credit: Baseline, Business Insider, and Ponemon Institute
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